Founded in 2022, Kaiber leverages vario1us open source projects like AnimatedDiff, Automatic1111, ControlNet and Deforum, among others. It also touts a proprietary layer of technology to fuse it all together into one artistic tool.

Like other AI video generators (Runway, Meta’s Make-A-Video and Google’s Imagen Video), Kaiber allows users to either upload images/videos or type in their own ideas to generate animated content.

Kaiber offers two types of animation style — “Flipbook,” a frame-by-frame effect, or “Motion,” a fluid style where content smoothly transitions between frames. Users can describe how they want the video to look or select from Kaiber’s pre-prompted subjects and styles.

Kaiber allows users to customize the camera movement, whether they want the animation to zoom in/out, rotate clockwise or counterclockwise or move up, down, left or right. There are also different aspect ratios, depending on which platform the creator wants to upload the video. For instance, 16:9 for YouTube, 9:16 for TikTok and 1:1, 3:4 or 4:3 for Instagram. The longest video duration allowed is eight minutes, but the company plans to support longer videos in the future. Videos take 30 minutes to generate.

Additionally, users can add their own music, making the app an affordable alternative for independent artists who don’t want to pay an animation studio hundreds of thousands of dollars for just one video. Plus, Kaiber includes an Audio Reactivity feature, meaning the output responds to whatever audio the user uploads.

“Our mobile app brings Kaiber’s core capabilities — such as text-to-video, image-to-video and video-to-video — into a compact, user-friendly format,” co-founder and CEO Victor Wang told TechCrunch.

Wang added, “While some advanced tools like comprehensive storyboarding and specific text-to-video models remain web-exclusive, customers should expect feature parity very soon.”

Alongside the app launch, Kaiber has partnered with three independent artists to launch a “Create with” feature, which is exclusive to the mobile experience. Users can create content using music and generative AI styles catered to each artist.

Notably, one artist is the co-founder and CTO of the company — Eric Gao, whose stage name is Oksami. He has over 53,000 Spotify listeners and nearly 58,000 YouTube subscribers. Users can sample four of his most popular songs, including Midnight Diner, which has over 1 million streams on Spotify. The two other artists featured on the app are Yung Bae and August Kamp.

Regarding commercial rights, creators who pay for an account own the videos they make. Users with free accounts get a Commons Noncommercial 4.0 Attribution International License, meaning they have permission to use the content but can’t sell it. Videos made with a free account will come with the Kaiber logo watermark.

Kaiber also offers an affiliate program, which lets creators earn a 10% commission on subscription referrals. Affiliates continue to earn commission for as long as a referred customer remains a subscriber.

Kaiber’s app is available on iOS and Android devices. There are three subscription tiers: Explorer ($5/month for 300 credits), Pro ($15/month for 1,000 credits) and Artist ($30/month for 2,500 credits). One credit equals a one-second-long video. However, the credit cost also varies depending on which feature is being used. There’s also a seven-day free trial that comes with 100 credits.

“Our core thesis is that the creative process is hard,” co-founder and head of creative Jacky Lu told us. “But the creative process has common denominators across all modalities like music, video, images and other forms of art — humans make stuff in similar patterns. And to make the best art, we need intuitive and simple tools and the ability to be inspired by others. Now with gen AI, we can make art with others and with machines.”

Kaiber came out of beta this past May with over 2 million users. Now, the company touts more than 5 million sign-ups. Kid Cudi’s AI-powered lyric videos and Linkin Park’s AI music video helped put Kaiber’s name on the map, along with a viral TikTok trend called “Astral Jump.” The company’s studio technology offering — Kaiber Studios — has supported over 2 million artists with generative audio and video, including Grimes, Wu-Tang Clan, Money Man, Don Diablo and Mike Shinoda.

Kaiber is entirely bootstrapped. In the first few months of launching, the company reported seven figures in gross revenue.

Wang and Gao are childhood best friends whose mothers immigrated to America from Shanghai together. They started their first startup, Secret Garden, in February 2022 as a response to the web3 NFT craze. The company’s first sale grossed $1.2 million, profiting around $300,000, enough to seed the business. Unfortunately, however, the FTX crash wiped out Secret Garden’s funds, and they had no choice but to fold.

“The FTX.us crash tested our resilience, but our determination only grew stronger, leading to the birth of Kaiber from the ashes of Secret Garden,” Wang said. “It’s a narrative of overcoming adversity, fueled by passion and an unwavering belief in the transformative power of AI in the music and visual arts.”